Time’s Eye

The tension was broken by a squeal. A little girl of about five, with a face round as a button, had touched the wall of the Soyuz and had come away with a burned hand.

The men growled as one. Musa’s killer pressed his sword against Kolya’s neck. His mouth was open, his eyes small, and Kolya could smell meat and milk on his breath. Suddenly the world was very vivid: the animal stink of the man before him, the rusty scent of the steppe, even the surge of blood in his ears. Was this to be his last memory, before he followed Musa into the dark? …

“Darughachi,” he said. “Tengri. Darughachi.”

The man’s eyes widened. He backed away, but he kept the sword raised, and the rapid conversation resumed, but now the men stared even harder.

Sable hissed, “What did you say?”

“Schoolboy memories.” Kolya tried to keep his voice level. “I was guessing. It mightn’t have been their language at all; we could have landed anywhere in time—”

“What language, Kolya?”

“Mongolian.”

Sable snorted. “I knew it.”

“I said we were emissaries. Emissaries of Eternal Heaven. If they believe it, they will have to treat us with respect. Hand us over to local officials, maybe. I’m bluffing—just bluffing—”

“Good thinking, Batman,” Sable said. “After all these guys saw us fall from the sky. Take me to your leader. Always works in the movies.” She actually laughed, a forced, ugly sound.

At last the circle around the cosmonauts began to break up, and nobody came to kill them. One man pulled on a jacket and felt hat, ran to a hobbled horse tied up beside a yurt, mounted it and rode briskly away.

The cosmonauts’ hands were tied behind their backs and they were prodded in the direction of one of the yurts. It would have been difficult to walk even without tied hands; Kolya felt as if he was encased in lead, and his head sang. Staring children, picking their noses, formed a sort of honor guard as they passed. One nasty-looking brat threw a rock that bounced off Kolya’s shoulder. It was hardly a dignified return to Earth, he thought. But at least they were alive; at least he had won them some time.

The door flap of the yurt was pulled open, and they were shoved inside.

***

Sable and Kolya were thrust down onto felt mats. In their stiff pressure suits the cosmonauts were huge in the yurt, and their legs stuck out comically in front of them. But it was a relief just to sit down.

The yurt’s single doorway faced south; Kolya could see the sun beyond a layer of haze. That was a Mongol tradition, Kolya knew; in their rudimentary theology there was a strand of sun-worship, and here on the plains of northern Asia the sun wheeled through its daily circles predominantly in the south.

Mongols came and went, apparently to inspect the newcomers, squat men and muscular-looking women. They stared at the cosmonauts, especially Sable, with greedy calculation.

Some of the cosmonauts’ gear was brought in from the Soyuz capsule. Much of this—emergency medical kits, an inflatable life raft—was incomprehensible to the Mongols. But Sable and Kolya were allowed to change out of their bulky spacesuits into the lighter orange jumpsuits they had worn on orbit. The Mongol children stared at their underwear, and the rubberized trousers they stripped off. The spacesuits were stacked up in a corner of the grubby yurt like abandoned cocoons.

The cosmonauts both managed to conceal the existence of their sidearms, tucked behind their backs, from the Mongols.

After that, to Kolya’s huge relief, they were left alone for a while. He lay against the yurt’s grimy wall, his limbs trembling, trying to still the beating of his heart and clear the fog in his head by sheer willpower. He should have been in the hospital right now, surrounded by state-of-the-art twenty-first-century technology, beginning a program of physiotherapy and recuperation, not stuck in the corner of this stinking tent. He was weak as an old man, and before these stocky, powerful Mongols he was utterly helpless; he was resentful as well as frightened.

He tried to think, to take stock of his surroundings.

The yurt was sturdy and well-worn. Perhaps it belonged to the chief of this little community. Its main support was a stout pole, and lighter wooden stakes and slats shaped a dome of felt. Grubby mats covered the floor, and metal pots and goatskins hung from hooks. Stacked around the walls were chests of wood and leather, the furniture of a traveling people. The yurt had no windows, but a hole in the roof had been cut over a fireplace of hearthstones, where lumps of dried dung burned continually.

At first Kolya puzzled about how the yurt could be taken down and reerected, as it must be at least twice a year as the nomads traveled between their summer and winter pastures. But he had noticed a broad cart, parked a short distance away. Its bed was easily wide enough to take the intact yurt, contents and all.